Chapter 1: The Glitch on the Road

Chapter 1: The Glitch on the Road

The morning of June 9th was aggressively, unapologetically perfect. The kind of California morning that tourism brochures were made of: a sky the color of a robin's egg, a sun that warmed without scorching, and a gentle breeze that carried the scent of jasmine and cut grass. For Leo Martinez, it was just another Tuesday. Another sixty miles on the bike before the world was truly awake.

His thighs burned with a familiar, satisfying ache. His breath was a steady rhythm in his ears, a metronome counting out the cadence of his pedals. This was his sanctuary. The road. The disciplined cycle of push and pull, the world blurring into streaks of green and gray at his periphery. Here, there were no anxieties about tuition fees, no worried glances from his mother about him working too many hours. There was only the asphalt, the bike, and the burn.

He was on the final stretch, a long, sloping residential road he’d ridden a thousand times. Manicured lawns, sleeping houses, the occasional newspaper sitting on a driveway. He pictured his mom, Sarah, probably just finishing her night shift at the hospital. He imagined the smell of the arepas she’d have waiting for him, her tired but smiling eyes asking if he’d pushed himself too hard again. The thought spurred him on, a final burst of energy for the last few miles.

That was when the world glitched.

A silver sedan, parked innocently at the curb, pulled out without a signal.

Time didn't slow down like it does in the movies. It shattered.

There was no moment for a clever swerve, no space for a heroic escape. There was only the primal, instinctual clench of his hands on the brake levers, a futile gesture against the physics already in motion.

Desire: Complete his training ride and get home to his mom. Obstacle: A car pulls out unexpectedly, causing a catastrophic accident.

He saw the glint of the sun on the windshield, obscuring the driver's face. He heard the squeal of his own tires, a high-pitched scream of rubber on pavement. Then came the impact.

It wasn't one sound, but a symphony of destruction. The sickening CRUNCH of carbon fiber and aluminum, his twenty-five-hundred-dollar bike vaporizing beneath him. The explosive pop of his front tire. And then, his own body. A brutal, percussive thud against the car's unforgiving steel quarter panel.

The pain was absolute, a white-hot nova that detonated in his chest and radiated through every nerve ending. He was airborne for a heart-stopping second, a ragdoll tossed by a careless giant. He saw the world tumble—blue sky, green treetops, grey asphalt, blue sky again. The landing was worse. A wet, shattering impact that drove the air from his lungs in a silent gasp. The world went dark.

Action: He instinctively brakes but cannot avoid the collision. Result: He experiences the visceral, agonizing pain of the crash and blacks out.

And then… nothing.

No pain. No darkness.

Just… silence.

Leo was standing on the sidewalk. The morning was still perfect. The breeze still smelled of jasmine. He blinked, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. He looked down at himself. His cycling jersey was pristine, not a scuff on his shoes. He felt… fine. Perfectly fine.

A wave of dizzying relief washed over him. What a crazy dream. Must have dozed off for a second on the bike…

But the scene in the middle of the road was still there. The silver sedan, its side dented inwards. The mangled, unrecognizable pretzel of what was once his bike.

And the body.

His gaze was drawn to it against his will. A young man, sprawled on the asphalt in a way that defied the natural angles of the human body. He was wearing a familiar red and black cycling jersey. Scuffed white cycling shoes. His short-cropped black hair was matted with something dark against the pavement.

A cold dread, far worse than the memory of pain, began to creep up Leo’s spine. He took a hesitant step forward. From the open door of the sedan, a woman was screaming into her phone, her voice thin and hysterical.

Sirens wailed in the distance, growing closer with terrifying speed.

No, he thought, the word catching in his throat. No, that's not possible.

He drifted closer, an unwilling spectator to his own nightmare. He could see the face now, slack and pale, a trickle of blood at the corner of the mouth. It was his face. Leo Martinez’s face. The face that had looked back at him from the mirror just an hour ago.

Turning Point: He finds himself standing on the roadside, unharmed, watching the aftermath of the crash.

The first ambulance screeched to a halt. Paramedics spilled out, their movements efficient and urgent. One of them, a burly man with a thick mustache, knelt beside the body.

“No pulse! Starting compressions!”

Leo watched, frozen, as the man laced his fingers together and began rhythmically pressing down on the chest of the body on the ground. On his chest.

“Get the pads on him!” another paramedic shouted, ripping open a bag.

“NO!” The scream was silent, a thought that clawed at the inside of his skull but made no sound. He lunged forward, reaching for the paramedic’s shoulder. “STOP! I’M RIGHT HERE!”

His hand met nothing. Not even resistance. It was like passing through a cold spot in the air, a pocket of static that made the hairs on his arm stand on end. He stumbled back, his mind reeling.

This isn’t real. This is shock. A hallucination. An out-of-body experience. I’ll wake up any second.

But he didn’t wake up.

The paramedics worked with a desperate, focused energy. They attached pads to the body’s chest. A machine whirred to life.

“Clear!”

The body on the ground convulsed, a horrible, puppet-like jerk. Nothing.

“Again! Charging!”

Leo could only watch. He was a ghost at his own death scene. A silent, invisible witness to their fight to save a life he was no longer inhabiting. A strange, metallic scent, like ozone after a lightning strike, lingered in the air around him. He had a fleeting, disjointed memory from the moment of impact—not just the crunch of metal and bone, but a flash. A blinding, impossible flash of golden light that had seemed to burn itself onto the back of his eyelids.

“We’ve got a rhythm! It’s weak, but it’s there! Let’s get him on the backboard! Move, move, move!”

They loaded the broken form of Leo Martinez onto a gurney with practiced speed. As they lifted him, his head lolled to the side. For a terrifying, heart-stopping moment, the vacant, glassy eyes of the body on the gurney seemed to stare directly at the Leo standing on the sidewalk.

A profound, soul-deep vertigo seized him. The two halves of an impossible equation, staring at each other across an unfathomable divide.

The ambulance doors slammed shut, the sound like a final judgment. With a scream of sirens, it sped away, carrying the shattered remains of his life with it.

Leo stood alone on the quiet suburban street. The silver sedan was still there, a monument to the moment his reality had broken. The sun was still warm on his skin, a skin he could feel but couldn't seem to use.

He was alive. He was unharmed. And he had just watched himself die.

If that was him in the ambulance… then what, in God’s name, was he?

Surprise/Ending: He watches his own body being taken away in an ambulance, realizing he is an intangible observer, a ghost at his own potential death, leaving him with an impossible, terrifying question about his own existence.